Daughters of an Emerald Dusk

By Katherine V. Forrest

Fifty-five years have passed since 4,000 women escaped a tyrannical Earth and colonized the planet of Maternas. The women of the Unity have brought children into their world, the first in the history of humankind to inherit a legacy of ultimate freedom and possibility.

But these children are a breed unto themselves. They have bonded and communicate with each other in a way the older generation cannot fathom, and most disturbing of all, they question many of the Unity’s cherished precepts, laying claim to a rival standard of conduct.

Into this widening schism walks young Joss. She becomes deeply involved with Emerald, a woman who struggles to locate her long-lost daughter and finds herself caught between two factions in a burgeoning conflict of the gravest proportions.

With Daughters of an Emerald Dusk, Forrest has created her most electrifying, suspenseful, and yes, sexiest novel yet in this acclaimed series that began in 1984 with Daughters of a Coral Dawn.

Originally Published by Alyson Books 2005.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bella Books
• Release date: Mar 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781642472127

Katherine V. Forrest

Katherine V. Forrest is the groundbreaking author of Curious Wine, the Kate Delafield mystery series and the Daughters science-fiction series. She’s also known as a prolific editor with anthology and non-fiction credits in her own name as well as the editor of hundreds of novels. Dozens of lesbian writers count her among their mentors. Selected as the 2009 recipient of the Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement award, winner of five Lambda Literary Awards and the GCLS 2009 Trailblazer Award, she is widely credited as a founding mother of lesbian fiction writing. Katherine lives with her partner Jo in the Southern California desert. In addition to writing and editing, Katherine is also the Supervising Editor of Spinsters Ink.

Book preview

Synopsis

Fifty-five years have passed since 4,000 women escaped a tyrannical Earth and colonized the planet of Maternas. The women of the Unity have brought children into their world, the first in the history of humankind to inherit a legacy of ultimate freedom and possibility.

But these children are a breed unto themselves. They have bonded and communicate with each other in a way the older generation cannot fathom, and most disturbing of all, they question many of the Unity’s cherished precepts, laying claim to a rival standard of conduct.

Into this widening schism walks young Joss. She becomes deeply involved with Emerald, a woman who struggles to locate her long-lost daughter and finds herself caught between two factions in a burgeoning conflict of the gravest proportions.

With Daughters of an Emerald Dusk, Forrest has created her most electrifying, suspenseful, and yes, sexiest novel yet in this acclaimed series that began in 1984 with Daughters of a Coral Dawn.

Table of Contents

Cover

Synopsis

Title Page

Copyright Page

Also by Katherine V. Forrest

Dedication

Acknowledgment

The Women of Maternas

2205.6.01 - Olympia

Personal Journal of Joss

Personal Journal of Minerva

Personal Journal of Joss

Personal Journal of Olympia

Personal Journal of Joss

Personal Journal of Minerva

Personal Journal of Joss

Personal Journal of Minerva

Personal Journal of Olympia

Personal Journal of Joss

Personal Journal of Minerva

Personal Journal of Joss

Personal Journal of Minerva

Personal Journal of Joss

Personal Journal of Minerva

Personal Journal of Joss

Personal Journal of Olympia

Personal Journal of Joss

Personal Journal of Minerva

Personal Journal of Joss

Personal Journal of Olympia

Personal Journal of Joss

Personal Journal of Minerva

Personal Journal of Olympia

Personal Journal of Minerva

Personal Journal of Minerva Onboard The Foremother

Personal Journal of Olympia Onboard The Foremother

Bella Books

Copyright © 2005 by Katherine V. Forrest

Bella Books, Inc.

P.O. Box 10543

Tallahassee, FL 32302

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First Published 2005 Alyson Books

First Bella Books edition 2014

eBook released 2014

Cover Designer: Sandy Knowles

ISBN 13: 978-1-59493-454-4

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Also By Katherine V. Forrest

From Bella Books

Curious Wine

An Emergence of Green

Daughters of A Coral Dawn

Daughters of an Amber Noon

From Spinsters Ink

The Kate Delafield Series

Amateur City

Murder At The Nightwood Bar

The Beverly Malibu

Murder By Tradition

Liberty Square

Apparition Valley

Sleeping Bones

Hancock Park

High Desert

To Jo Hercus,

for everything

Acknowledgments

I am especially grateful to:

Jo Hercus, my cornerstone and best critic.

My longtime friends whose invaluable input has been part of this series from its very inception: Montserrat Fontes and Clarice Gillis.

The wonderful Cath Walker, Ph.D., friend and indispensable scientist in residence, even though that happens to be in Australia.

Nancy Corporon for her caring insights and eagle eye.

Angela Brown, editor in chief at Alyson, whose attentive work and contributions to this novel are exceptional.

Many thanks once more to all the devotees of the Unity and the world of Maternas, who have written to me over the years.

I am especially indebted to James Lovelock for his espousal of the Gaia Theory, and all his books, especially Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine (Oxford University Press, 2000), which aided immeasurably in crystallizing the thinking of my lifetime for my own book. And to the inestimable Arthur C. Clarke, whose vision and affirmation have inspired much of my futuristic work.

THE WOMEN OF MATERNAS

Mother

Her Daughters—The Inner Circle:

Minerva—the Historian

Christa, her partner

Celeste, their daughter

Olympia—the Philosopher

Ceeley, her long ago partner

Vesta—the Psychologist

Carina, her partner

Hera—the Astrophysicist

Diana—the Geneticist

Demeter—the Meditech

Venus—the Biologist

Isis—the Mathematician

Megan—the leader of the first expedition to Maternas

Laurel—her partner

Emerald—their firstborn daughter

Esme and Adira, her daughters

Crystal—their second-born daughter

Quira and Taura, her daughters

Tara, Megan’s sister, and the leader of the Unity on Earth

Joss, Tara’s partner

Silke, Joss’s mother

Trella, Joss’s sister

Nitara and Verda, Trella’s daughters

Niabi, Kaylee, Netis—daughters of Nitara and Verda

Danya, senior security officer on Maternas

Erika, a geophysicist

2205.6.01—OLYMPIA

As of this day, I embark upon my greatest adventure. For the first time in my long life I hold only the scantest concept of the future spread out before me.

We cherish the peerless days in the history of our Unity, days beyond all our dreams, each seeming more consequential than any previous…

The first, surely, the day our extraordinary, singular Mother gave birth to the original nine of our Unity—of which I am one.

The day six generations later when our Unity came to its momentous decision to abdicate all further involvement in the affairs of Earth. Seven months afterward, the day that 4,144 of our number made their clandestine departure to seek a new home in the stars.

The day following, when the 2,011 remaining on Earth—of which I am one—selected our home to be in the forbidding—and what we mistakenly thought to be safe—environs of Sappho Valley, historically known as Death Valley.

Finally, that most tumultuous day of all, the confrontation with Theo Zedera, who had spent more than two years relentlessly scouring the entire planet for us.

And now this day. Wisdom and perspective—the fruit borne out of my more than a century of life—should persuade me that proclaiming this day as the most significant of all is foolish.

Call me foolish.

Still, I swing from exhilaration to despair. If wholly uncharted terrain beckons to me, I must leave my beloved Earth to seek it; and I know not when or if I will return. Beyond that: The sister closest to me, dearest Isis, is adamant that at least one of Mother’s original nine must remain as her representative on our birth planet and destiny has appointed her for this role.

A moral and most admirable position, I concede. One I have done my utmost to subvert. Including recruiting the ultimate ally, Mother—she being no more eager to lose a daughter than I am to lose the sister closest to me, my daily companion.

Taking Isis’s hands in hers, Mother scolded her: Phosh. There is no reason for you to remain. You are not needed here. She then issued her most potent declaration: All my girls can manage.

Gazing into Mother’s emerald eyes, Isis stated simply, I must remain.

Against my sister’s immovable conscience and sense of duty, if even an irresistible force like Mother could not prevail, that was the end of it, except for the pain of this loss that I can no more describe than convey the sensation of having my heart ripped out of me.

But then I have never had much aptitude for description, for any sort of eloquence, having performed these official recording duties out of necessity when my sister, Minerva the historian, departed with our Unity for the stars. During our time in Sappho Valley, I fulfilled the function with minimal efficiency, but in the year and a half since members of our Unity, including Minerva, returned to Earth during the climactic time of Theo Zedera, I did my duty grudgingly and only because Minerva contended that I must do so, that she lacked continuity of presence on the planet to take it over. During the nearly four months we will be in space, I will reclaim, indeed seize in my grateful embrace my previous occupation of philosopher, its rigors and luxuries of contemplation. Minerva, historian by profession, official recorder of the history on Maternas, will henceforth chronicle our future.

A future where the most basic unknown is time itself. My sisters who journeyed here from Maternas traversed a time warp, one we must also confront on the way back. Landing on Earth, they were shocked to discover that only three years had passed since their departure from Earth, while we were equally astonished that the equivalent of twenty-five of their 336-day years had elapsed on their new world. My sister Hera, our astrophysicist, is confident she can devise a course through hyperspace that will either circumvent or locate a wormhole puncturing the time warp.

If she fails, then this is the scenario as I understand it: My sisters were four months in reaching Earth, and another four will be required to return to Maternas. Additionally, they have been on Earth for two years and four months; our astronomers and physicists, led by Hera, required all this time for research based on the knowledge they had acquired in their journeys and for full remapping and reassessments of the star systems to avoid the time warp—this, combined with fitting our ship for the return trip. A total of three years, all told, will have passed by the time we reach Maternas. If Hera fails in her navigation theories, then another twenty-five years may have passed on Maternas, more or less, depending on the vagaries of the time warp.

It is only moments now until the completely refitted Connie Esperanza departs Earth. From what I hear of the unrest that had already begun to emerge on Maternas, and from the unease that has never left the faces of Megan and my sisters Hera, Venus, and Vesta, we travel toward considerable uncertainty…

I am about to decommission this recorder and keep only my personal journal.

Farewell, beloved Earth. May our Unity continue to tend you well.

I am no longer Olympia the historian. I am now Olympia the philosopher, and I go now to Maternas.

PERSONAL JOURNAL OF JOSS

The unimaginable has become my reality.

Even though it is very late into what passes for a Maternas night, I walk along a seashore under a sky of brilliant star clusters in a canopy of red and blue fluorescence. Three moons pour silver over majestic crashing waves, greater than any I have seen even during Earth’s highest tides. In a world whose daytime hours are lighted by double suns, there is never full darkness when those suns set, and I find myself in a royal-blue twilight of the most ethereal beauty.

It is sixteen hours since the landing on Maternas. Too infused with wonderment to sleep, I walk here alone, still digesting today’s events.

I had fantasized endlessly about the moment when Tara and I, following our revered Mother and esteemed members of the Inner Circle—her daughters Hera, Olympia, Minerva, and Vesta—would step off the Connie Esperanza’s shuttle craft onto the surface of Maternas and into the wonders of an alien landscape. I had dreamed of falling into the arms of the birth family I have not seen in six Earth years. Greeting and embracing old friends. Marveling over the presence of our Unity on a new world, all those familiar to me and especially those of the Unity new to me, the children born on this home in the stars. I thought I had fully anticipated the emotional upheaval I would experience, so it never occurred to me that I would be unable to record events as they happened.

When I stepped onto Maternas, were it not for the unmistakably firm ground under my feet and the nectar-like air I breathed, or the roar of greeting that vibrated in my ears, I could have been back in those disorienting months of hurtling through hyperspace. Back in the daydream in which I stand on Maternas, land of legend, amid the waist-high ivory grass I have seen only in facsimile. Instead I was frozen in place, holding scarcely a coherent thought, unable to record a single moment of my birth family struggling their way through a churn of bodies toward me; I was capable only of trembling, of weeping.

Thousands waited to welcome us, strewn in fantastical array around our landing area, a natural amphitheater created by mountains on three sides with a coral lake forming the fourth. The crowds screamed their joy in greeting those whom they had mourned for lost on the journey to Earth, and cheered their welcome to those of us venturing here for the first time.

Mother, gathering her ceremonial green robe around her, seemed disconcerted, even shaken by the bedlam, and raised both hands in that universal request to quiet the deafening affection raining down on us, a gesture that resulted only in even greater clamor at the return of this most revered personage among us. Megan, the beloved leader of the first expedition to Maternas, was met by her own wave of pandemonium, the endless chanting of her name. But she was oblivious, rushing toward the three who ran pell-mell toward her—her beloved Laurel, and their two daughters, Emerald and Crystal.

With my senses inundated, I was able to take in only a tiny fraction of what transpired, and then my birth family overwhelmed me. Silke, I sobbed, embracing her in a bursting agony of love and gratitude, my need so imperative and childlike that I crushed the warm solidity of her against me. Hurriedly, I buried my face against her neck to conceal what I am sure was transparent: visceral shock at my first close-up sight of my birth mother.

My trauma would have been far greater had I not been forearmed for the moment—if Vesta, when the failure of our attempt to circumvent the time warp was discovered, had not immediately begun to counsel all eighty of us on board, including even Mother and the Inner Circle.

The presence on the Connie Esperanza of this highly gifted psychologist could not have been more vital. During the time required to traverse the Pleiades, her preparation for our landing combined group counseling with pictorial presentations of the decades of Maternas history she had requested to be sent to our ship’s computers from Maternas. We in turn sent extensive reports of ourselves and the astonishing developments on planet Earth to Maternas.

To further ameliorate the stunning theft from us of the kind gradualness of time, the ship’s message banks were allowed to overflow with the fondest messages of greeting to and from the planet, and a series of holographic representations of our loved ones aging throughout the years was presented in privacy to each of us.

Even so, the jolt of seeing Silke had routed all this careful preparation. My sister Trella was obviously suffering her own dislocation; she simply gaped at me. Six years ago, when I last saw her, I was her older sister; I was now the younger by more than five decades.

Let me go, Joss, Silke ordered, and struggled within my paralyzed arms, prying me away from her. You’ve grown into a grand woman, she cried, gripping my head in both hands, then cupping my face, tracing my features with her fingers. "You are so young!" she screeched with such delight that it caused Trella to grimace and filled me strangely with pain.

You, I stammered, staring back at her, you look…you look… magnificent.

And she did. Fifty-five years on this planet had added age to her in the gentlest of fashion. Her face, framed in a simple fall of fine silver blonde hair, was an elegant filigree of age, her eyes a cleaner blue than I remembered. Her skin had burnished into gold under the double suns of this world.

I turned to my sister and hugged her tightly to me and amid the frenzy that reigned around us I put my lips to her ear to declare, "It’s good to see you. If only I can grow to look like you!" If indeed I could be anything like my supple, gracefully mature sister…

One aspect of Trella had not changed: her shyness. We have so very much to share with each other, she told me, eyes downcast, cheeks dimpling in a smile, an achingly familiar shadow of youth in the foreign maturity of her face. Then, shaking her head as if greater awareness had just arrived, she said proudly, Joss, meet my daughters, Nitara and Verda.

I am ashamed to say I could not take in Trella’s two daughters even as they spoke graciously and embraced me. My glance had fallen upon the three virtually nude, statuesque women behind them, waiting to make their own greetings to me.

Trella continued, introducing those three, "And these are their